I leave it to you, Barbara, if that isn't the test of friendship." For a moment the two riveted their eyes on the floor.

Then the humor of the situation came to Monty.
"I did not know that we were supposed to do Gibson tableaux to-night," he said drily as he proffered his arm.
"I don't understand," and Barbara's curiosity overcame her determination not to speak.
"Don't you remember the picture of the man who was called upon to take his late fiancee out to dinner ?" The awful silence with which this remark was received put an end to further efforts at humor.
The dinner was probably the most painful experience in their lives.
Barbara had come to it softened and ready to meet him half way.

The right kind of humility in Monty would have found her plastic.

But she had very definite and rigid ideas of his duty in the premises.

And Monty was too simple minded to seem to suffer, and much too flippant to understand.